Moving fast and breaking things

Facebook’s bad week

Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen arrives to testify during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing entitled 'Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower' on Capitol Hill, yesterday in Washington, DC.  Picture: Getty

Little did we think when we reminded readers yesterday of Mark Zuckerberg’s famous entreaty to staff ― “move fast and break things” ― that his company Facebook were at that very moment engaged in doing just that.

The six-hour outage, caused by the company’s tekkies making changes to their routers which meant that data traffic could not be guided to the right destination as usual, or indeed at all, wiped some €60bn off Facebook’s share valuation. Down went Facebook, What’s App, Instagram, Messenger.